It was in Sydney that New Zealand-born, Adelaide-trained Cazneaux ultimately made the photographs on which his high historical reputation is justifiably based. His personal vision helped to shape a nation's understanding of itself in the first half of the twentieth century. Emerging from the poetics of the pictorialist tradition, Cazneaux nonetheless admired, and imitated, the racier, more hard-edged themes of modernist photography. His interest in contemporary European photography, especially that of the German Weimar Republic, confirmed his subject matter as urban, industrial and documentary. The building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge provided him with a project perfectly formed for his artistic needs. Here, in but one of many superlative examples, Cazneaux contrasts the uncompromisingly mechanistic structure with a subtle tracery of light and shadow.